Thinking through the Anthropology of Experts

Dominic Boyer

ABSTRACT: This article offers a synthetic overview of the major opportunities and im-
passes of an emergent anthropology of experts and expertise. In the wake of the boom
in anthropological science and technology studies since the 1980s, the anthropology
of experts has become one of the most vibrant and promising enterprises in social-
cultural anthropology today. And, yet, I argue that the theorisation and ethnography
of experts and cultures of expertise remains underdeveloped in some crucial respects.
The body of the article defines expertise as a relation of epistemic jurisdiction and
explores the sociological and epistemological dilemmas emerging from research, that
poises one expert (the anthropologist) in the situation of trying to absorb another re-
gime of expertise into his/her own. With due appreciation for what the anthropology
of experts has achieved thus far, I close with a manifesto designed to prompt a reas-
sessment of where this research enterprise should go from here. I urge that we treat
experts not solely as rational(ist) creatures of expertise but rather as desiring, relating,
doubting, anxious, contentious, affective—in other words as human-subjects.

KEYWORDS: Anthropology of experts, epistemology, ethnography, expertise, reflexivity

Experts on experts ent social designation, not one that seemed

Over the past two decades, anthropological
research on experts and cultures of expertise
has blossomed from the margins of the field
into a vibrant area of concern. Although it
would be fair to say that anthropology always
exhibited some appreciation for the expertise
of its research subjects, especially in matters
of ritual and material culture, it was only in
the 1950s and 1960s that commentary on the
social figure of ‘the expert’ began to appear
routinely within ethnography, particularly, in
the tradition of Evans-Pritchard, discussion
of ‘religious experts’ and ‘ritual experts’ (see,
e.g., Howell 1953:85; Knutsson 1963:507; Lewis
1963:112; Lienhardt 1962:85). But the motivat-
ing interest of this commentary typically re-
mained religion or ritual rather than expertise
per se. ‘The expert’ was a relatively transpar-
to admit or reward further anthropological
theorisation.
In some respects this designative trend
has continued even as studies focused on ex-
perts and expertise have become one of the,
by my count, three flourishing enterprises
of social-cultural-historical anthropology to-
day. The other two are what might be called
‘subjectivist anthropology’, the vast anthropo-
logical energy exerted to chronicle and analyse
the constitution of schemes of personhood,
subjectivity and, above all, ‘identity’ (e.g.,
Daniel 1987; Hall and du Guy 1996; Jack-
son 1998; Kondo 1990; Moore 2007; Rapport
2003) and ‘critical-historicist anthropology’,
with twin roots in the Marxian-Gramscian
and Nietzschean-Foucauldian traditions and
focusing on the sociopolitical configurations
of modernity, especially late capitalism and

Anthropology in Action, 15, 2 (2008): 38– 46 © Berghahn Books and the Association for Anthropology in Action
doi:10.3167/aia.2008.150204

late liberalism (e.g., Comaroff and Comar-
off 2001; Ferguson 2006; Harvey 2006; Ong
2006; Povinelli 2002; Stoler 2002). The surest
sign of the coming of age of an ‘anthropol-
ogy of experts and expertise' has been the
enormous explosion of interest around an-
thropological science and technology studies
(S&TS) (e.g., Fischer 2003; Fortun 2001; Fran-
klin and Roberts 2006; Gusterson 1996; Helm-
reich 2000; Knorr Cetina 1999; Latour 1988;
Rabinow 1997; Sunder Rajan 2006) and in the
increasing application of S&TS-derived analy-
tics to other spheres of human social activ-
ity including work on professional networks
and cultures, technocracy, public culture, in-
tellectuals, bureaucracy and some kinds of
organisations and social movements. Just like
the other two, the anthropology of experts has
broad ambitions, porous boundaries, and is
home to a wide variety of different research
problems and methods. What distinguishes it
from its sibling enterprises is simply its cen-
tring of experts, their practices, institutions
and knowledges, as the ethnographic core of
anthropological concern.
Yet, even as experts have come to receive
increasingly prominent billing in the ethnogra-
phy of modernity (see Holston 1989; Mitchell
2002; Rabinow 1995; Shore and Wright 1997),
the theorisation of exactly who or what counts
as ‘expert’ continues to be underdeveloped,
certainly not reaching the degree of techni-
cal interest and elaboration characteristic of
other social-scientific fields like behavioural
and cognitive psychology (Ericsson and Smith
1991) or even science studies itself (Collins and
Evans 2002). Even if technical precision is not
always an advantage when dealing with ana-
lytical categories meant to be highly elastic and
inclusive, we need to move beyond signalling
the presence of experts and towards grappling
with what kinds of persons they are. In anthro-
pology, what would be most helpful would be
a theorisation of experts and expertise, which
could speak meaningfully to and across the
dominant phenomenological, praxiological and
Thinking through the Anthropology of Experts | AiA
semiological encampments of our discipline.
Therefore, for the purpose of this article at
least, I would suggest that we define an expert
as an actor who has developed skills in, semi-
otic-epistemic competence for, and attentional
concern with, some sphere of practical activity.
By this definition a car mechanic or a street
performer are clearly experts in their respec-
tive crafts although the qualitative and social
dimensions of their expertise are very different
(and valued differently) from those of more
technocratic (and widely recognised) experts
like doctors, lawyers or scientists. Indeed, by
linking expertise to skill, competence, attention
and practice, it becomes clear that there is no
human being who is not ‘expert’ in some fash-
ion, much as Gramsci wrote that all men are in-
tellectuals even if not socially validated as such.
Although the very openness of the definition
may therefore appear to weaken its analytical
capacity, I would argue that the way in which
it highlights the tension between the experien-
tial-performative and social-institutional poles
of skilled knowing and doing actually gives us
analytical traction in just the right place.
I would also note that when skilled knowing
takes normative precedence over skilled doing
in a given sphere of expert activity we should
use the term ‘intellectual’ instead of expert
(Boyer 2005:43-45). Much of the contemporary
anthropology of experts actually centres then
on ‘intellectuals’, in my definition, on knowl-
edge specialists, and especially on those who
operate as members of professional networks
in organisational or institutional contexts.
And herein lies both an essential dilemma
and opportunity of the anthropology of ex-
perts. Although most anthropological research
involves dialogues with other kinds of experts,
even knowledge specialists, the anthropol-
ogy of experts highlights these dialogues in
its research practice, creating the situation in
which one kind of knowledge specialist, the
anthropologist, analyses the ideas, conversa-
tions and practices of another. One immedi-
ately wonders: how can an anthropologist,
| 39
AiA | Dominic Boyer
as an expert (in ethnographic representation
and social-theoretical analysis) meaningfully
engage the social experience of another culture
of expertise without calling into question, at
some level, precisely that expertise that is the
ostensible locus of their social practice and
‘culture’? Can different principles and regimes
of expertise really coexist in anthropological
representation and analysis? This creates, if
not exactly a crisis for the anthropology of ex-
perts, then at least epistemic consequences that
are worth considering at greater length.
Contingent jurisdictions, anxious
analysts
In an important recent article on ‘cultures of
expertise’, Doug Holmes and George Marcus
have noted that anthropological engagements
of other experts inevitably bring anthropologi-
cal knowledge into disquieting, but also poten-
tially productive, juxtaposition with a plurality
of modes of ‘para-ethnographic’ knowledge
that now exist outside the networks and insti-
tutions of academic anthropology.
They write:
In our experience, ethnographers trained in
the tradition of anthropology do not approach
the study of formal institutions such as banks,
bureaucracies, corporations, and state agencies
with much confidence. These are realms in
which the traditional informants of ethnography
must be rethought as counterparts rather than
‘others’—as both subjects and intellectual part-
ners in inquiry. … Here we suggest a particular
strategy for re-functioning ethnography around
a research relation in which the ethnographer
identifies a para-ethnographic dimension in such
domains of expertise—the de facto and self-con-
scious critical faculty that operates in any expert
domain as a way of dealing with contradiction,
exception, facts that are fugitive, and that sug-
gest a social realm not in alignment with the
representations generated by the application of
the reigning statistical mode of analysis. Making
ethnography from the found para-ethnographic
redefines the status of the subject or informant,
40 |
asks what different accounts one wants from
such key figures in the fieldwork process, and
indeed questions what the ethnography of ex-
perts means within a broad, multi-sited design
of research (Holmes and Marcus 2005:236-237).
My first field research project with former East
German professional intellectuals—schooled
as they were in Marxism and informed as I
was by German dialectical social theory and
philosophy in graduate school—became en-
tirely entangled in para-ethnography in the
course of fieldwork. Many of my informants
had been, as accredited professionals in a so-
cialist party-state, well trained in the Marxian
canon and had developed interpretations of
post-socialist transition in eastern Germany
that were strongly informed by dialectical
conceptions of history (see Boyer 2005, 2007).
To give just one example, while describing the
politics of history in the post-unification me-
dia, one former East German journalist in her
thirties explained to me:
The only time I think being East German works
negatively against you is when you express
opinions that perhaps this bourgeois-democratic
system does not represent the end of history.
And, when you suggest that something may
come after it. Because, like any system, it’s go-
ing to come to an end sooner or later, maybe
in fifty maybe in a hundred years and then one
has to think about what will come after it and
what kind of a society that should be. But that’s
completely taboo to talk about the end of this
system because the moment they hear you say
something like that they think, ‘Oh, she wants
the GDR back,’ which isn’t the point at all. The
West Germans have no problem asking us how
we could have lived in the GDR, but I don’t
think they’ve ever thought about how they
would answer an outsider’s question fifty years
from now who would ask them, ‘How could you
have lived in the Federal Republic of Germany
with its unemployment, with hunger, well not
much hunger, but with homelessness definitely?’
(Boyer 2000:474-475)
My interlocutors’ faith in the dialectical
potentials, tensions and actualisations

embodied in history became intimately famil-
iar to me in the course of my field research
and, in a sense, offered me at once both data
and theory seemingly ‘readymade’ for my
dissertation work. The symmetry was seduc-
tive and illusional—I not only found that my
analytical intuitions grew into the testimony of
my interlocutors but I also envisioned myself
thereby to have largely evaded the challenges
to anthropological analysis raised by the post-
colonial critique (e.g., Asad 1973; Said 1979).
How could one criticise me for imposing
western analytical paradigms and categories
upon my field area since my field area had,
in fact, originated many of these paradigms
and categories, and since, in fact, Marxian
analytics saturated the discourse community
I inhabited.
For this same reason, however, I was prone
to fear that my own dialectical intuitions were
adding nothing analytically ‘new’ to the native
point of view. A dialectician studying other
dialecticians did not seem quite capable of
evoking the impression of critical theoretical
distance of the kind that is often valued as
an index of objectivity or sophistication. The
space between frame and content, so to speak,
seemed overly compressed. But this was also,
to some extent, a matter of an anxious fetish-
isation of the locus of doubling itself (e.g., dia-
lectical analytics of potentiality and actuality).
In the empirical fullness of my fieldwork con-
versations, my interlocutors and I were analyt-
ically quite diverse in our engagements with
one another. Potentiality and actuality were
sometimes key categories in our dialogues but
at other times they were not, especially when
the problem of history was not on the table.
Nevertheless, these ‘found’ dialectical knowl-
edges and encounters with critical dialecti-
cal analytics eventually propelled my entire
project towards an anthropology of dialectical
knowledge itself (see Boyer 2005).
Other anthropologists of experts, I should
note, have read into parallel situations in their
own field research the threat of an epistemo-
Thinking through the Anthropology of Experts | AiA
logical end point for anthropology in the po-
tential doubling, collapse and/or cancellation
of analytical knowledge forms—for example,
what happens to anthropological theory in the
situation where the expert subject has already
decided that theory has failed (e.g., Miyazaki
and Riles 2005)? Is it fair or even possible to
theorise the failure of theory?
While such arguments highlight certain pro-
vocative limit cases in the expert engagement
of experts, the more salient and general un-
derlying problem remains sociological, one of
jurisdiction, which Andrew Abbott terms the
‘defining relation’ in professional life (1988:3;
cf. Brint 1994; Freidson 2001). In other words,
the relevant questions are: On what basis does
the representative of one culture of expertise
(the anthropologist) claim legitimate analyti-
cal jurisdiction over the members of another
culture of expertise and how is this claim
enacted? How can I document another expert
culture without precisely re-framing their ex-
pert knowledge in the analytical categories of
my own, thus absorbing them into my juris-
diction? This situation is further complicated
by the recognition of para-ethnography (and
‘para-theory’ for that matter) as a broader
social phenomenon in that the anthropologist
also confronts the circumstance that, as aca-
demically un-accredited as it might be, both
ethnographic and social-theoretical knowl-
edge-making now abound outside of the disci-
plinary nexus of anthropology, in part through
the success of earlier generations of anthro-
pological popularisers. Think, for example, of
the expanding appropriation of ethnographic
research techniques and academic social-theo-
retical paradigms (especially culture theory) in
the business world, in government and even
in the military (Rohde 2007). What are we
to make of these monstrous encounters with
expert knowledge that is both ours and not
ours, uncanny doubles in Freud’s language
‘that having been an assurance of immortality
… becomes the uncanny harbinger of death’
(Freud 1919)? What does it indicate about the
| 41
AiA | Dominic Boyer
specificity and validity of our jurisdiction as
anthropologists? Are anthropologists threat-
ened with eventual superfluity under these
circumstances?
To put it bluntly, the core dilemma emerg-
ing from the anthropology of experts and
expertise is an unexpected confrontation with
the contingency of jurisdiction, which often is
construed as a situation of analytical doubling
and which thus prompts fears of negation of
the unique expertise so much at the core of the
social figure of ‘the expert’. What the dilemma
of the anthropology of experts principally
signals is not the encounter with something
unprecedented, as much as with something
intimately known but normally repressed,
whose startling return from repression, of
course appears both new and threatening. One
might fairly argue, for example, that the juris-
dictions of expertise, which constitute profes-
sions, are always ‘constructed’ and maintained
at the level of practice. But professionalism,
as ideology in Zizek’s sense, dampens that
reflexive recognition down to the extent that it
is capable, making expert jurisdictions at once
constitutionally ‘real’ and their anchorage in
constituting social practices invisible. In these
terms, ideology is not false consciousness; it is
the repression of the social basis of conscious-
ness in order to produce the sense of epistemic
universality requisite for action (an insight
which, I have argued, belonged to Marx’s
concept of ‘ideology’ as well) (see Zizek 1994;
Marx 1971[1846]; Boyer 2005).
The anthropology of experts, as an intrinsi-
cally, if sometimes unwillingly, reflexive mode
of inquiry, confronts the well-professionalised
anthropological expert with his/her own epis-
temic contingency in ways that, as I have sug-
gested, can be seriously unsettling, but also,
as Holmes and Marcus’s discussion of para-
ethnography demonstrates, productive and
promising. This confrontation is why anthro-
pological research on experts has spurred seri-
ous consideration of the limits and necessary
renewal of anthropological theory (Rabinow
42 |
1999), rising even into talk of epistemologi-
cal dilemmas and crises. But we should un-
derstand this talk less as a description of an
empirically verifiable crisis and more as symp-
tomatic of a rich intellectual fantasyscape in
which the thrilling, nauseating possible nega-
tion or superfluity of anthropological expertise
is both feared and, at some level, enjoyed.
After all, if psychoanalysis teaches us nothing
else, it teaches that this condensation of anxi-
ety and pleasure is the constitutive paradox of
any object of desire (cf. Zizek 2006).
Epistemophagy and Entente cordiale
The anthropology of experts, precisely because
it thrives on the anthropological engagement
of professional intellectuals socially ‘like us’ in
most respects other than their specific expert
practices and knowledges, leaves its practi-
tioners particularly susceptible to circulating
in a paradox of desire. In other words, much
like Doug Holmes’s unsettling engagement
with the cultural theory of Jean-Marie Le Pen
(Holmes, 2000), one often finds the anthropol-
ogy of expertise both fascinated and repulsed
by the expertise of its subjects, not least be-
cause of our inability to feel entirely ‘at home’
in another epistemic jurisdiction.
Yet our ventures into other domains of
expertise are also not, strictly speaking, in-
nocent encounters in that they also reveal an
important predatory tendency at large within
intellectual professionalism more generally.
Every intellectual profession ideologically im-
agines its expertise as occupying the centre
of knowledge (even when individual experts
have their doubts), and thus exploring and
coordinating other epistemic jurisdictions are
important professional work that confirms the
universalist ambitions of one’s own jurisdic-
tion. Epistemophagy—the consumption and
incorporation of external analytics—becomes
a vital technique for shoring a profession’s
ideological centre against the oceanic flux of

knowledge specialisation and its concomitant
interjurisdictional rivalries. Cultures of exper-
tise thus routinely encroach upon one another,
challenging jurisdictions, borrowing ideas and
re-functioning them for new purposes and au-
diences. One sees this even in the oft-related,
humourously innocent anecdote of the expert
who has been waiting for the arrival of an an-
thropologist to study their culture of expertise
and who then proceeds to dazzle his/her in-
terlocutor with a cultural autoanalysis which,
in the name of ‘helping’ the anthropologist,
actually pulls the rug of expertise away and
turns the tables of analytical power. In my own
recent field research, for example, I met an as-
sistant chief editor of a major German news
organisation who explained that he was partic-
ularly keen to assist me in my research because
‘we had a group of sociologists here a couple
of years ago who performed an organisational
analysis to chart our work. They produced a
series of flowcharts, which were fine as far as
they went. The problem was that their model
was too abstract and I really couldn’t recognise
my experience of the work in it’. He nodded to
me significantly, reassuringly, ‘Teilnehmende-
Beobachtung [Participant-observation] should
be a much better methodology in this respect’.
With such informed informants, one might
wryly note, who needs analysts?
In such company, perhaps we can be for-
given for treading cautiously. The anthropol-
ogy of experts exhibits a strong tendency
towards—I cannot think of another word for
it—politeness. It is not always friendly or af-
firmative, but there are certain questions that
are just not asked. For example, I have not yet
seen a study that seriously addressed the ir-
rational halo of expert rationality, which took
seriously the place of desire, fantasy and anxi-
ety in the production of expert knowledge. It
is rare enough even to find studies of cultures
of expertise that follow experts outside their
work lives and workspaces, that go home
with them, to their children’s playgrounds,
to family gatherings, to bars, and so on (for a
Thinking through the Anthropology of Experts | AiA
counter-example, see Gusterson’s resourceful
ethnography of nuclear weapons scientists
beyond their labs, 1996).
If interjurisdictional rivalry and epistemo-
phagy always accompany the relationship of
experts to each other, the more public face of
inter-expert relations is a kind of supra-colle-
gial entente cordiale, whose politics of respectful
distance and reciprocal, professional knowl-
edge sharing are further strengthened by en-
vironments of specialised work practices, by
temporal intensity and by institutional restric-
tions that make it far more difficult to attain
the kind of social intimacy with our research
subjects that is the lifeblood of anthropologi-
cal knowledge elsewhere. The ethnography
of experts, especially in institutional settings,
tends to operate through relatively short for-
mal interviews and limited situational obser-
vation. Under these conditions, in Holmes and
Marcus’s terms, something like para-ethnog-
raphy—a reliance upon inter-expert collabora-
tion—is not just a virtuous opportunity, but
rather also an anthropological necessity of the
entente.
But like any political entente, the threat of
force, of exclusion, of surveillance, of pursuit is
never far away. Cultures of expertise are usu-
ally socially privileged, quasi-sovereign, often
able to restrict ethnographic access, to monitor
the acquisition and subsequent circulation of
their expert knowledge, and even, if they are so
inclined, to police ethnographic and theoretical
content. They offer obstacles like intellectual
property rights, offices of corporate commu-
nications and non-disclosure agreements that
would-be ethnographers must navigate. And,
even in the best access scenarios, the highly
specialised tasksets, professional credentials
and organisational hierarchies of many cul-
tures of expertise close doors to even the best-
prepared, most ‘insider’, ethnographers.
Given the difficulties of gaining access, it
perhaps should be unsurprising that, once
‘inside’, the ethnography of experts has
tended to encamp itself near the professional,
| 43
AiA | Dominic Boyer
institutional and public dimensions of expert
lives. As in all epistemic concentrations, the
focusing of attention in these areas has been
immensely rewarding and responsible for the
growing significance of work on experts and
expertise within anthropology. Nevertheless,
I would argue that the focus on professional
knowledges and practices has established sig-
nificant blind spots and inattentions. And so,
perhaps it is time to consider seriously where
the anthropology of experts should go next.
Manifesto
Anthropological knowledge can thrive and
has thrived under entente conditions. I am by
no means criticising what anthropological re-
search on experts and cultures of expertise has
thus far achieved. But I do think that its future
must lie beyond epistemophagous desires and
beyond collegial discretion. To conclude this
exercise in thinking through the anthropol-
ogy of experts, I offer an argument for a richer
representational and analytical practice in the
form of a manifesto of five points.
1. Engage the non-professional! Discover
more about those aspects of expert lives
that are not directly defined by their
work practice and explore the mundane
proportions and disjunctures between
expert and non-expert knowledges,
practices and relations in the lives of our
interlocutors. We should expect that this
move will be resisted, by colleagues and
informants alike, as inconsequential to
the ‘true object’ of the study. Ideologies
of expertise posit that the ontological
centre of an expert’s life is specialised
knowledge and practice. As professional
intellectuals ourselves, we should take
seriously our own susceptibility to these
ontological overtures. My feeling is
that anthropological research with ex-
perts tends too often to stay within the
44 |
ideological radius of possibility, which
contends that what is really important
and interesting to know about a culture
of expertise is the expertise, its proce-
dures and instruments, themselves. Yet I
would argue that this radius offers only
a fairly thin slice of humanity. Expand-
ing the research horizon of the anthro-
pology of experts is, of course, easier
advocated than accomplished for the
pragmatic reasons noted above. But, in
that case, inadequacies in ethnographic
knowledge should not be papered over
as embarrassments but rather lingered
on as prismatic gaps through which
the contingencies/limits/opportunities
of the anthropology of experts are fully
revealed.
2. Pay attention to process! One is not born
an expert; the phenomenology of exper-
tise (Boyer 2005:43-44) and the capac-
ity to operate productively in a culture
of expertise are acquired processually.
Professionalism should be considered as
a kind of habitus—if not bound by the
overarching sense of functional deter-
minism inherited from Bourdieu (1990),
the study of professionalisation (exper-
tisation) needs to be a more prominent
feature of the anthropology of experts.
3. Operate reflexively! Although we should
never lose sight of the significant dilem-
mas and impasses catalysed by the jux-
taposition of two cultures of expertise
in anthropological research on experts,
neither should we generalise those im-
passes as epistemological crises or fail-
ures of the anthropological project. What
we need is a better reflexive analysis of
this situation, one that explores with
more care the intersubjective and inter-
jurisdictional dimensions of research on
cultures of expertise and one that pays
greater attention to the ways in which
anthropological expertise may be se-
duced and repulsed in encounters with

kindred modes of expertise (including
and especially those that have absorbed
themes and techniques from our own
ethnographic, social-theoretical jurisdic-
tions).
4. Challenge the rational(ist) core! Work
on experts and expertise tends to be
strongly crypto-rationalist in its ori-
entation, lingering on the logico-ra-
tional dimensions of expert practice
and knowledge. These dimensions are
surely important to anthropological re-
search but even the most elaborate and
technically precise modes of rationality
possess a halo of sentiments, affects, in-
tentions and aspirations, none of which
should be reduced to secondary status
in expert knowledge-making. We need
to work harder to rediscover these and
not least the paradoxes of desire—de-
sire, for example, to refine one’s aesthet-
ics of expertise, to publicise, reproduce,
immortalise one’s work, to dominate or
outflank one’s opponents, to see one’s
expertise translated into social power,
and so on—that inhabit and inform ex-
pert practices as well.
5. Humanise the expert! All the other four
points amount to this one. The expert
may occupy or perform a ‘social role’ as
a particular kind of ‘modern subject’, but
foremost s/he is enmeshed in all the com-
plexities anthropology recognises human
life to entail. This is not to say that hu-
man life has a single template or that we
should aspire to humanism in a generic
sense. My point is that the anthropology
of experts needs to push harder in every
direction to make experts not solely the
creatures of expertise that the ideologies
and institutions of intellectual profes-
sionalism encourage us to recognise and
to make visible.
Dominic Boyer is Associate Professor of
Anthropology at Rice University.
Thinking through the Anthropology of Experts | AiA
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